“I really do have a lot of baggage,” I whisper.
“Everyone does.”
“A baby’s a bit more work than a dog.”
He chuckles to himself, shaking his head. “About like taking care of a guy dying of cancer, but with a better payoff in the end.”
I pause with my knife and study him.
“Sorry. Dark. Dark humor helps.”
“No, I know. I do it too sometimes. We all do.”
“I just meant—I take care of people, Ziggy. It’s what I do. What I’ve always done. My brother. My teammates. My neighbors. If I’d made it in Spain, I would’ve made a whole new family of new teammates to take care of there. Commitment doesn’t scare me. People don’t scare me. A baby’s just a little person. More family. Moregoodfamily.”
I don’t know who put this man in my path to be the one to find me gnawing on a grocery-store rotisserie chicken in a parking lot a month ago, but for the first time since I found out my best friend hated me, I feel like I’ve found a place I belong.
If I can get my dad on board.
“How are you single?” I ask him.
“Grief’s a bitch. How areyousingle?”
“Subliminal messages in my teenage years about no boy being good enough for me coupled with lingering childhood money fears making me a workaholic and a career environment where coworkers leave every week because their contracts have ended or they’re reassigned.”
That gets me a slow blink. “Your dad bought a fucking rugby team on a whim because the cost of the team was agood tax write-off. I read the articles. What we cost him every year in not being fully profitable is in the noise.”
“Stepdad.” I focus on the vegetables again.
“You call him Dad.”
“Doesn’t mean I want or should get any of his money. Not like I helped him make it. If he dies, Miranda gets everything but the house, which will go to my mom, and a trust fund for Mom now that they’ve made it past their ten-year anniversary. It was in the prenup.”
He scratches his jaw and watches me.
“Honestly? I think that’s part of why he’s so insistent that she not date any of the players. She could own the team one day. Messy dynamics.”
“But you won’t.”
“I will not. Every time he’s said he’s changing his will to include me, I tell him no. He’ll probably leave me something anyway, because I can’t stop him, but I don’t want to live off of what he built. I don’t want to depend on it. I want to be able to take care of myself. To build and live my own life. Get back to working in the wine industry. Directly. Not doing a made-up-for-me job running catering for the team. Imisswine. Having a glass with dinner. Trying a new vintage of an old favorite. Watching people find one they like… It’s a fun job. I miss it. And I have no idea if I’ll ever work in the industry again once the baby’s born, but I hope I do.”
“If it makes you happy, then I do too.”
I put a sauté pan on the stove to heat while I crack eggs. “That’s what I hope Dad says too.If it makes you happy.”
He lifts his brows. “Think he will?”
“No. I mean, not immediately. But maybe eventually? Even if I moved in with my parents or you moved in with ateammate, you’ve been my friend. Those are in short supply in my life right now. If anyone in my family wants to tell me we can’t be friends, they can fuck right off.”
He lifts his brows.
I grin. “Or so I’d tell them if I didn’t know how that would end. Diplomacy is going to get us much further thanfuck off.”
“You like him?”
Isn’t that the question. “I didn’t at first. I thought he was trying to buy my approval with phones and video games and money for shopping trips. I might’ve whined a time or two to Abby Nora that I wished my biological dad hadn’t died in a car accident before I was old enough to remember him. But Roland took me to school—himself, no driver—and he picked me up from my after-school activities, and he helped me with my homework. Miranda didn’t live with us, not full-time, so I could’ve been a major inconvenience, but he did the dad things without complaining. He likes taking care of people too. He just takes it too far sometimes.”
“He’s not wrong. Your sister shouldn’t date any of the guys on the team.”
